David Weinberger writes a long, fluent, and searching piece about anonymity online, arguing for anonymity to be the norm online, just as it is in "face-to-face" life.
Here is an extract:
"Before we have all this clear, we're going to have to make some decisions. My fear is that we are in the process of building a new platform for identity in order to address some specific problems. We will create a system that, like packaged software, has defaults built in. The most important defaults in this case will not be the ones explicitly built into the system by the software designers. The most important defaults will be set by the contingencies of an economic marketplace that does not particularly value anonymity, privacy, dissent, social role playing, the exploration of what one is ashamed of, and the pure delight of wearing masks in public. Economics will drive the social norms away from the social values emerging. That is my fear."
(One can dream of being able to write like that.....)
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